Goll dang plum perfick

We've had the whole family visiting for a couple of weeks. It's been most excellent altogether. Only reasonable amounts of he-said-she-said and only reasonable amounts of ice-cream. The parents of Gdaus have been working from home foreign, so the Aunties have been getting their nibling fix with the pandemic having put the kibosh on 2020. The best thing seems to be a bit of a rope swing at the bottom of the yard - this is clocking up more hours than the various available 'devices'.

Neighbour came by with a crate of windfall plums and invited us to scoop as much as we could use . . . 3.5kg which settled at 2.85kg after discarding the livestock and the pits. The standard wisdom is that fruit should be matched with an equal weight of sugar; but Dau.II and I decided to skimp the sugar down to 2.5kg. You can see from the tide-mark [L] that these quantities are close to the carrying capacity of my trusty jam-boiler. But the photo doesn't do justice to the pink and yellow sunset which materialised shortly after the brew came to the boil. And some wonder of chemical transformation made the final product 10x pots of a deeply satisfying plummy purple. 

There is a lot of virtue in jam: once it's made it lasts forever at room temperature. The same cannot be said about ice-creams.  After slaving over a hot stove for a chunk of the afternoon, the sun came out and ice-creams all round were ordered from the deep-freeze. We lolled about on the grass consuming cold saturated animal fat [except for the working parents!]. With silent aplomb, one of our two resident buzzards Buteo buteo swooped over the gate and settled in the lower branches of our tragic ash tree Fraxinus excelsior. It was like an omen and a blessing on the work of preserving the work of god with the work of human hand. A perfick day.